Current Issue #488

Book Review: Munich

Book Review: Munich

In 1945, the Fuhrer wistfully mourns: “We ought to have gone to war in 1938.” Munich tells you why he didn’t.

Robert Harris’s protagonists are Hugh Legat, a young highflying secretary of Chamberlain, and Paul Hartmann, a former friend and fellow Oxford student in the German Foreign Office.

Hartmann is not only a Foreign Office official, he is a member of the German resistance. Legat mysteriously receives the text of Hitler’s orders to his generals to prepare for a two-front war against Czechoslovakia and France in September 1938. Although Legat and Hartmann have had no contact since 1932, who could have sent it but Hartmann?

Colonel Menzies of British Intelligence gets Hugh onto Chamberlain’s plane while Hartman weasels his way onto the Fuhrer’s train from Berlin. He hopes to open Chamberlain’s eyes with still more damning secret evidence.

Well, we know Hartmann and Legat will fail but what will happen in Munich to these courageous former friends? Read on.

Author: Robert Harris
Publisher: Penguin Books

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